World Youth Skills Day

World Youth Skills Day, observed annually on 15 July, focuses on the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship.

In 2014, the United Nations General Assembly declared July 15 as a World Youth Skills Day (WYSD) to celebrate the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills.The day provides a unique opportunity for dialogue between young people, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions, firms, employers, policymakers, etc. The Skill India Mission was also launched on this day, that is on July 15.

• The theme of World Youth Skills Day 2021 is "Reimagining Youth Skills Post Pandemic". The Permanent Missions of Sri Lanka and Portugal to the UN, the Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth, UNESCO, and ILO will organise a virtual event that will offer an opportunity to reflect on skills that are needed today and for the future.

The day takes place in a challenging context, with the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting in the widespread disruption of the TVET sector.

In 2021, the World Youth Skills Day will again take place in a challenging context. The COVID-19 pandemic continues, reaching a scale that could hardly have been anticipated one year ago. While vaccinations offer hope to bring the situation under control.

• This year’s World Youth Skills Day will again take place in a challenging context, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic . It aims to celebrate the resilience and creativity of youth throughout the crisis and focus attention on how technical and vocational education and training (TVET) systems have adapted to the pandemic, participate in the recovery, and imagine priorities they should adopt for the post-COVID-19 world.

• Young people aged 15-24 have been even more severely affected by the COVID-19 crisis than adults. Globally, youth employment fell by 8.7 per cent in 2020, compared with 3.7 per cent for adults.

Young women have been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic as compared to young men.

UNESCO estimates that schools were either fully or partially closed for more than 30 weeks between March 2020 and May 2021 in half the countries of the world. In late June, 19 countries still had full school closures, affecting nearly 157 million learners. And 768 million more learners were affected by partial school closures.